The heaviness of Keats’ mood contrasts painfully with the light-hearted nightingale, who is, at first, an annoyance (“too happy in thine happiness”). “My heart aches” is as much a physical complaint as an expression of soulful yearning he is experiencing an unpleasant numbness which “pains” his senses – so unpleasant that he compares it with the imagined experience of taking poison, or “some dull opiate” – a particularly mind-numbing narcotic – that will cause him to pass out. (Charles Brown) Despite Brown’s comment that Keats “felt a tranquil and continual joy” in the nightingale’s song, the opening of the Ode admits discomfort and dissatisfaction. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, containing his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat from two or three hours. In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Whereas the inspiration for Ode to Psyche was literary, Keats’ host in Hampstead records the actual event that lead to the composition of Ode to a Nightingale :
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